[that-left-turn]

I'm not sure if it was you, but someone said Melissa would not work with Gimple again. Can you tell me where that info came from?

I did not post about that, but I don't know anyone who'd actively want to work under him. Drafts are always worse after Gimple's done a pass and like I said in the previous post, nothing came of the announcement that More Tales of the Walking Dead was in development.

[that-left-turn]

If, "Gimple has no credibility as a writer" why is he STILL allowed to write?

You also said that Melissa would know first if she's about to be fired, but that isn't how it always works. I worked with a woman at my job who went high up the ladder. She informed me when they were going to try and find a reason to fire me because I stood up for myself against their abuse. I knew what they were planning months before they attempted it thanks to that woman (we are not friends, we were co-workers, and she knew I was a hard worker, and she warned me) Leaks happen. Someone could have liked Melissa and let it slip to someone they trusted, and Sarah Callies could have said something. No one knows. Why do you think that isn't true?

If, "Gimple has no credibility as a writer" why is he STILL allowed to write?

See this post. He's also not actively writing: Gimple has EP credit and the right to give notes on the current TWDU shows due to his exec title of CCO. He was supposed to showrun More Tales of the Walking Dead, but that show quietly went away after it was announced. (I suspect the individual episodes were "spaghetti on the wall" to audience test different premises for a show.) The treatment and/or outlines were probably unsalvageably bad, even to AMC.

You also said that Melissa would know first if she's about to be fired, but that isn't how it always works.

It is for above-the-line in TV. We don't all work in the same space or casually bump into one another 'in the building' the way most other businesses do. For instance, AMC's offices are in NY and LA, while TWD was shot in ATL—there's a whole country in between. Studio space, production offices and set locations are also usually not within a quick walk of each other, even when they are in the same metropolitan area, which isn't always the case either.

The supervising exec (at the studio) and the showrunner are the people who know about the actors whose options aren't picked up. The former isn't on set and wouldn't be talking to any actors, informally or otherwise. They are only in regular contact with the showrunner, so unless the exec went out of their way to get Sarah's phone number to call her up to gossip about how her friend Melissa didn't get a pick-up, that's not how it happened.

Calls to and from the studio go through assistants, who schedule them, and are thus logged. That means both at the executive's office and the production manager's. Contact details directly to the actor are kept by the production company; the studio communicates via the actor's reps, not directly with an actor. It's done this way for legal protection, which probably isn't relevant in your field and the only people who actually need to reach an actor on short notice (for scheduling changes) is production staff.

So, Melissa was the first to know about Carol getting killed off in S3 and she was the first to speak up on the matter.

[that-left-turn]

Hi, hope you’re doing well! Do you know anything about what was intended for Connie before LR got the Marvel role and had to be written out of season 10? I’ve seen some theories that she was intended to be a midship for Daryl and that Leah got written almost last minute when LR had to leave, because amc still wanted a midship for Daryl. Do you know if there’s any truth to that, or if it’s likely? Given all of the subtle hints and forward planning for flashbacks to the 6-year time jump, I’m very curious whether Leah was intended all the way back in season 9, or whether she did only get invented last minute.

Leah was always the plan, not as a midship for anyone, but as a catalyst for emotional growth. I've never been in a production meeting where anyone discussed the need for a 'midship.' That's not how emotional arcs are defined, but old school networks (and AMC) like to tease the possibility of romance if it happens to fall in their lap without a need to commit. That is, if fandom starts to ship something that wasn't planned, execs like to exploit the situation for whatever engagement they can.

The studio didn't like that a portion of the audience saw Daryl as potentially a virgin rather than a heroic loner. It isn't "manly" enough for a leading man to be seen as inexperienced. Using female minor characters (who are irrelevant to the main story arc) to show that the male hero is sexually attractive is a way of "correcting" that which doesn't take screentime away from what's important to the story and doesn't lock in any particular character trajectory.

When Angela Kang took over as showrunner, she would've looked at the long game for the main characters and how she could shade their arcs, so Leah's relevance to both Daryl and Carol's emotional arcs was conceived and broken much earlier than her actual appearance on the show. Angela would've also had to plan for the original Caryl spinoff and where both Daryl and Carol would land at their exit from the flagship show. Obviously, Daryl couldn't have a girlfriend at the Commonwealth whom he abandoned in favor of going out on the road with a different woman.

Magna's whole group was irrelevant to the overarching narrative; none of them had any real character arcs of their own and no impact on the plot. (It's easy to lift them out of the story without losing cohesion of the main storyline.) Their only real purpose beyond the subplot to service Michonne's arc was to have Yumiko take her place as the lawyer with a relative at the Commonwealth (as per the comics). The group would eventually have rounded out the cast under Maggie and Negan, if the flagship show hadn't been canceled. At that point, there would've been screentime to flesh out all of them as main characters rather than supporting cast and they didn't have history with Negan, which would've serviced him as the lead of the show.

Unfortunately, the story arc involving Leah was botched during the power struggle for S11 and subsequent spinoff, which makes it feel like there was no purpose to her being there in the first place, other than to aggravate longtime Daryl fans.

[that-left-turn]

Hi, I hope you don’t mind me asking if you know anything about what the general opinion has been of the DD spinoff?

I don’t know whether the majority of audience is international or American, and I only really know the response of a handful of people from countries outside the US.

I’m from one of the countries Daryl and Carol went to in Europe, and I found all of it very offensive to be honest. It got worse every season, but even, for example, Daryl’s (and Antonio’s) suspenders outfit felt offensive. That’s what Americans think Europeans wear? What century do they think we’re in? To wear that for the whole run of the all three to four seasons. And dressing other characters in similar historical looking clothes.

We have plenty of apocalypse and zombie tv shows and movies made in our own countries, and none of them are anything like that. Did nobody on that show watch any? I’m getting distracted, but really I wanted to ask you about the American response. To me, the spinoff represented the worst of how we feel Americans see us. And so I’m wondering whether the American audience or other people in the business see the issue with the cultural representation too?

I think Norman and/or the other stooges claimed that ‘Europeans would fall back on what they know in the event of a zombie apocalypse,’ as if all Europeans are experts in medieval warfare and virgin sacrifice. It’s obviously wildly offensive to other peoples that these four white men think that rest of the world is somehow backwards for not being American. A lot of the time, travel to Europe is marketed with this idea of “old world charm,” which is very far from how the vast majority of Europeans live, but the creative team behind DD seems to have bought into that concept wholesale.

Zabel didn’t even watch the flagship show, so we can’t expect him to have watched anything that would require subtitles for him to understand and I’d be surprised if the EPs realize that, with global streaming platforms, non-US programming is something Americans watch too. Ben Davis, the guy in charge of programming at the studio, should definitely be looking at international comps, but I doubt that he is, considering the slate at AMC. The international market is important to any show, even at the big traditional networks, because that’s how you keep earning, through licensing.

I can’t speak for what a whole country thinks about a whole continent, obviously. The US is physically large, much bigger than Europe and not everyone here has the same exposure to foreign cultures, but there’s a difference in thinking cobble stoned streets are quaint (audience) and exoticizing a setting (DD’s EPs). It’s something that’s unfortunately usually done to other places, like Asia and South/Central American countries in action adventures, but we do see the occasional spy/cop show have car chases down narrow one-way streets in the historical center of European cities.

So, there's a tendency to transfer culturally American narratives to locations where they don’t fit in order to give the domestic audience a ‘fresh’ setting. For the most part, it doesn't work. Americans see that for the cheap gimmick it is: to disguise your old tired plot that's been done to death.

It’s far more likely for showrunners, directors and studio execs to notice the troubling cultural representation in DD because it’s more common to have visited France and Spain (or the UK) than Morocco or India. (Both require very long flights from the US.) It’s painfully obvious from how Ash (in TBOC) was written as a generic white guy that Zabel has no understanding of Indian cultures either. That said, I don’t know anyone else who produces TV who's watched DD. It's not a show on anyone’s radar.

[that-left-turn]

Because I've gotten a few asks that want to tell me all about showrunning or Gimple's genius, I feel compelled to point out a couple of things.

If a showrunner says, in an interview or at a convention, that they discuss plot lines with the actors, it makes them and (more importantly) the show look good in front of the fans. It doesn't make that statement true. The brand promotion for TWDU is "found family," which is a marketing illusion. Everybody isn't involved in every decision—TV production is hierarchical, not anarchy. People who make a beloved TV show fudge facts for the same reasons everyone else does: to make a good impression and to sell their product.

(If anyone has stumbled across my tumblr by accident: I work in scripted television, so I'm familiar with how a show is produced. I'm not fansplaining.)

Gimple went from supervising producer in S3 to showrunner in S4. That promotion is the equivalent of going from being a first year resident at a hospital to department head. It doesn't happen because the studio 'likes your ideas'—you don't have the necessary skill set or experience to make that large a career jump. It's a major sign that something was afoot BTS during S3. Gimple took advantage of a terrible situation for personal gain; that’s how he’s failed upwards and is still there despite running the show into the ground in S7-8.

There's also a reason why people who've worked on TWD will still talk about Darabont but they don't mention Mazzara. Just like how the agreed upon explanation for Melissa's absence in DD S1 was that it was "logistically untenable" for her to relocate, the same is true for Mazzara and his "failure to produce." Saying that he didn't complete scripts on time is less of a problem for either party than the actual reason he was fired.

I've danced around this topic before because every time I see a fan of the female characters/actors praise this showrunner, I feel nauseous. But in plain English: he's a sexual predator, not a champion for the downtrodden. There are more than a couple of stories about him circulating among female creatives, but here's a screenshot that's directly relevant to TWD:

[that-left-turn]

So, why was Carol saved in season 3? Or was that all made up starting with Nicotero? Surely not, since MMB said she was told on the phone by GM that Carol would be killed.

And why did Andrew Lincoln tell Melissa that Sarah Wayne Callies fought for her if that wasn’t true?

I do think I once heard that they changed it T-Dog because IronE Singleton kept showing up late to set, but I don’t know if that’s true.

Could it not be true both that SWC spoke up on Melissa’s behalf and that she didn’t actually have any power? Melissa said she was asked what she thought of the decision to kill Carol, and that all the writers were on the phone at the time. That seems unusual to me. It seems possible that when SWC was told about Lori’s death, she might have said something similar to what Melissa said, like expressing that she thought it was a shame or a “mistake” as AL put it. She might not have literally lobbied for it, but she might have expressed an opinion here or there, which is still something.

For the record, I like Sarah. I wasn’t saying she’s anything like Gimple. As a woman in the industry, it’s just fraught with danger to voice your opinion on anything outside your own job description. (Telling insecure white men that they’re making “mistakes” is how you get labeled as difficult to work with and potentially fired yourself if they’re petty enough.) Obviously, I wasn’t part of whatever conversations Sarah had with the EPs, so I can’t say for certain what she did or didn’t say, but I am dead sure she wasn’t the first person they told about writing Carol off the show.

Melissa knew before any of her castmates did and would have made her plea first. She saved Carol with how she had created a fleshed out person from the stereotype she was given.

The normal procedure for an actor to be told their option isn’t picked up is for the showrunner or another senior EP to call them. If the actor is a lead, the call is made by the showrunner. For supporting cast, the showrunner’s #2 could place the call because showrunners are very busy during pre-production. If there’s an expectation of trouble, there could be one other person on the call too, like a senior EP or someone from legal, depending on the circumstances surrounding the release. Otherwise, it’s a private conversation.

An actor will not get a termination call in the middle of a writing session. The showrunner needs to run the decision by the studio and get approval before they can let a main cast member go and nobody gets fired with an entire audience. Melissa could’ve been invited to speak to the writers’ room after initially having talked to the showrunner, so they could all hear her thoughts on Carol. It would give the room some inspiration to get an outside perspective if they were unable to see beneath the surface of ‘battered wife.’

[that-left-turn]

It seems interesting to me that Gimple thought the hook to get people’s attention and endear fans to him would be to link him to Carol and Melissa. Especially given the indications that, if a reunion show helmed by Gimple were to go ahead, Melissa and Carol wouldn’t be involved. I suppose there are a number of possible explanations for why he thought that was a good idea, but I don’t really understand.

When you say a TWDU break would be good, how long are you thinking? I thought the problem was that AMC is struggling financially and needs something successful from TWDU fast in order to keep in business.

Thank you for taking a look at the article and giving your take. Really appreciate hearing your insights. And yes, you’re right about the Gimple reunion show quote. I don’t really think it deserves repeating, but he essentially said fans would be shocked to know how much is going on behind the scenes to make it happen and that it’s not guaranteed but he believes it will happen. So, same old.

“...fans would be shocked to know how much is going on behind the scenes to make it happen...”

Well, he would need to pitch a story (which involves a whole lot more than saying “wouldn’t it be cool if...”) to the head of development (aka Bad Ben) and McDermott. There’s detailed paperwork involved in making a pitch and literally everyone at AMC hated Gimple’s efforts at writing a feature; TOWL wouldn’t have happened without Danai’s involvement. Usually, you pitch to a bunch of studio execs and then approach the actors once you have the studio’s interest in the project, but Gimple probably needs Andy to reach out to AMC, saying he’s interested, because Gimple has no credibility as a writer.

TWDU shows aren’t cheap to make because they require a lot of stunts, VFX and building of sets. Anything that involves a lot of work on visuals in post always costs a ton to produce. Add six actor salaries to that, all of whom have expectations on how much they should be featured and it turns into contract negotiation hell. Properly servicing six characters’ arcs in a 6-8 episode limited-run show is a tall order—fans shouldn’t expect something emotionally satisfying with those constraints, even if a good writer was attached.

Because TWDU is also an aged franchise that's been in continuous production for 15 years, it has numerous challenges. One being audience acquisition. AMC would be lucky to recoup production costs of a reunion show because the audience is only people who are already/still invested in TWDU. Rick die-hards, Richonners, Negan apologists fans... A reunion means nothing to people who haven’t watched the other shows and AMC can’t make a profit without attracting new viewers.

So yes, I do believe that Gimple is running around like a muppet behind the scenes, but no mainstream media is picking up the buzz he’s trying to create. If the twitter source for the new quotes on the reunion show is an Arabic language one, then it’s probably the same account Gimple usually uses to try to spread his gospel.

“When you say a TWDU break would be good, how long are you thinking? I thought the problem was that AMC is struggling financially and needs something successful from TWDU fast in order to keep in business.”

It’s a catch-22 for AMC.

They only have two IPs to keep them in the black, so they have to milk TWDU, but when AMC canceled the flagship show to make three concurrent spinoffs, they oversaturated the market. Particularly as some of the shows devalued the IP by damaging the characters in ways that can’t be repaired. The other thing Gimple is interested in making is a next gen show, which is a risky move even if the cast would be cheaper, because none of those characters have enough authority to draw an audience. That’s why AMC cut the coda with young adult Coco, Gracie, Hershel and the Grimes siblings which Gimple wanted in the TWD finale. There is no demand for a show centered on RJ Grimes.

TWDU needs a break long enough to recover from DC and DD. The former poses a problem for the franchise because it’s set further into the future than the other two post-finale spinoffs, and the latter butchered the characterization of both Daryl and Carol, as well as contradicted narrative choices established in the original show. Both shows have painted the franchise into a corner because you can’t pick up the story at the end of either show.

When Angela Kang took over TWD she turned the show into a western because after a decade plus into a zombie apocalypse, the stakes and dramatic tension of survival horror are just gone. You have to find a new angle and shade an aging show and/or franchise differently to make it feel fresh and interesting to the audience. In order to make a successful TWDU show with preexisting characters, there has to be some sort of a reset and that can’t happen while DD hasn’t aired its final season and DC is still in production. I say “some sort” because there’s a variety of ways you could approach a reset that doesn’t involve blatantly rejecting canon the way DD does.

AMC needs to either burn off the last season of DD quickly or shit can it. If Negan and Maggie aren’t in a potential new show, DC doesn’t matter (and can stand as-is) because of its timeline five or so years after the TWD finale, but the ways in which DD reappropriated Carol’s character arc for Daryl and even stole her hero weapon is a significant problem for the story integrity of the franchise.

[that-left-turn]

The interview was on TVLine. I didn’t click on it to get the link because I didn’t want to give it the engagement, but I saw the quote on tumblr and TVLine posted it on Twitter where some people commented against it. Ironically enough, DR at EW did the interview in 2016(?) which highlighted Sarah Wayne Callies’ prominent role in saving Carol from being killed in season 3, which Gimple fails to mention. There’s also another brand new quote from Gimple saying more things about a reunion show, which I think was released on Twitter about 24h after the TVLine interview.

Well, here's the TVLine thing, for reference, with my response to your ask behind the cut:

Like I said in my previous post, this is something almost all actors do. They claim to have had influence over storylines/arcs, when in reality, they have little to no agency. It’s a way build their brand and increase job prospects. Sarah had no power to make anything happen when she was on the show; she simply used the situation to her advantage to market herself a couple of years later. Just like Gimple. He was in the writers’ room at the time, but he didn’t call any shots.

It depends on the individual showrunner how amenable they are to listening to actor opinions. (Most aren't very, for valid reasons.) Actors don’t attend (pre-)production meetings, so they don’t have the big picture and they don’t give notes or watch dailies. The nature of the industry is such that actors have to look out for themselves (which is why they’re less than truthful in their media interactions and play up their own impact on the production). They have to ensure that viewers like them and will watch their next project—I think fans vastly overestimate how invested actors are in the story of any given show they work on. It’s a job and while actors might care for their character, it’s a gig economy and what they worry about is increasing their own name recognition and marketing authority.

(I keep telling you, Melissa is different. Her love and care for the overarching story and her attention to detail beyond the scope of her own involvement is not the norm. Far from it.)

Sarah had no leverage during her time on TWD to affect creative decisions, particularly not on a production as viciously misogynist as TWD was in S3, but her narrative makes for a good story. Women standing up for other women. Underdogs. And, it fits the survivalist themes of TWD. Just like all the talk about “TWD family,” it’s good marketing for the show and the franchise, which is why it was promoted as such. It served AMC and Gimple in 2016, but it’s now a decade later and Gimple needs to build goodwill for himself and to be seen as the good guy by disillusioned fans.

We need to keep in mind that Sarah’s supposed advocacy for Carol would’ve happened at the same time as the decision to kill off Andrea too, later in the same season. The story is broken during pre-production, not as the season moves along and if Mazzara was open to listening to the women working for him, don’t you think Andrea’s arc would have ended differently? Gimple rewrote her death scene to something slightly less offensive than in the original script, but he didn’t have the power to save her or Carol. I keep saying that the writers don’t have any real power over what they write and the same goes for the actors.

The new TVLine write-up is particularly ridiculous because it’s not newsworthy—both Gimple’s and Nicotero’s quotes are years old and the whole thing’s just a regurgitation of things written by others. It’s an effort to stay relevant and a precursor to talking about what you mention above. A reunion show. That’s all Gimple has and he doesn’t really have that either, but it’s his one shot at getting AMC to throw him a bone. It’s not in the studio’s best financial interest to further saturate the market with another spinoff and anything written by Gimple won’t give AMC any ROI, even if TWDU wasn’t an aging franchise.

The best thing the studio could do right now, is for TWDU to take a break. Let the franchise rest for a beat. A rapid cycle proliferation of TWD spinoffs does nothing but create viewer fatigue, especially as the they don’t give us a fresh take on anything. It’s the same characters, going through the same soul pain. Not to mention that the quality of the writing is quite poor. There’s also a limit to how many tight shots of Rick’s bloodshot eyes, sweat dripping off his nose, that I can take. AMC’s reliance on TWDU and the Annie Rice universe to keep them solvent is a game of diminishing returns.

I don’t do twitter, so I haven’t read Gimple’s new statement on a reunion, but I assume it’s just a variation on the same theme of how magical his pitch is. If it was the wonder that would save the studio from bankruptcy, AMC would want to build hype for this ‘epic event,’ but the only person who talks about a reunion is Gimple. In the real world, a reunion show would be a logistics nightmare, projected ROI quite limited and AMC doesn’t have the cash flow to fund it.

[that-left-turn]

Why would Gimple be trying to resurface his claim that he pushed to keep Carol alive in season 3 of the main show right now? He did another interview on that subject specifically and he talked about Melissa’s “sheer thespian power”, Carol’s character development, and ended on “Her strength doesn’t let her die.”

Oh Gimple. "Sheer thespian power." 🙄

Where is this interview, exactly? (He usually uses DR at EW, TVLine and Collider for his messaging.) Gimple has to be pretty desperate by now: no other studio will hire him and AMC doesn't greenlight his pitches.

Is he running his ideas by the public again? He has a tendency to share his failed pitches with the rest of us, thinking he's a misunderstood genius. But, if the other development execs don't want it, no one will. (AMC has all of one good guy in development. The rest of them are all clowns.)

If you give me a link, I'll look at the interview. See what's up 🙃

[that-left-turn]

Do you think the season 9 time jump caryl stuff is something explicit that Carol, Daryl and Ezekiel were all involved in? Or do you think it’s just Ezekiel being jealous of Daryl without a specific event being the reason?

💯 specific stuff that happened. There are plenty of episodes in both S9 and 10 that allude to what transpired between the three of them and throughout both seasons, Daryl and Ezekiel are foils for each other. "Find Me" is the most information in one place, but it has connective tissue in almost all the other episodes, starting as early as 906, "Who Are You Now?"

[that-left-turn]

You mentioned Carol's background never being mentioned. So what do you think her family dynamic was. Do you think she had siblings? Was she raised in a divorced family? Thinks like that.

I have so much to say 🙈 but I’ll confine this post to the three verbal references to Carol’s family in the flagship show. They’re all from Angela Kang’s run and will give us a idea of the discussion inside her writers’ room and the direction they were taking Carol in.

Everything has to serve a purpose:

There’s a need for word economy in screenwriting because a lot of different elements have to fit into a one-hour episode, especially so on an action heavy show. All dialogue has to service the story/character arcs. Cutting for time messes with continuity, pacing and the build of narrative tension, so the writers choose the characters’ words with purpose.

Because the camera is an observer—the audience isn’t inside the protagonist’s head, like in a novel—word choice and phrasing become very important. How a character says something matters. The director and actors will base their interpretation on it, so there’s no such thing as a throwaway line in a script.

Let’s look at the dialogue which introduces Carol’s parents and her grandmother to the viewers:

CAROL’S GRANDMA “Find Me” (1018)

What’s significant in this beat?

Carol’s grandmother had a sewing machine that she put to good use, which tells us that she was practical, handy and self-sufficient. Like Carol.

She made Carol’s clothes, so the family didn’t have much money. The line also implies that she was heavily involved in Carol’s upbringing. It could’ve been a multi-generational household, but she could equally well have been her granddaughter’s primary caregiver.

Having Carol help her and the way in which she did so tells the audience that the two had a good relationship. She enjoyed Carol’s company, she was teaching her things in a playful way and she focused on positive reinforcement in order to get her grandchild to follow directions.

Key takeaway: she might very well be the reason for Carol’s resilience and capacity to love.

CAROL’S MOTHER “New Haunts” (1110)

This line is really interesting. Why does she say “always”? If her mother actively raised her to pay attention to details, Carol would’ve just said, “my mother taught me...” The line implies that it was her mother’s behavior in general that showed Carol the value of being alert. There are two primary ways in which that could be viewed: either Carol’s mother had bad things happen to her because she wasn’t ‘observant,’ or she was unkind to Carol when she wasn’t perceptive enough for her mother’s liking.

It's quite possible that Carol’s dad used to beat her mom. The context of the scene with this line is about making a man’s life easier, but the phrasing does suggest that Carol herself might’ve been verbally or physically abused by her mother. They’re not mutually exclusive possibilities, but they both raise an interesting similarity between Carol and Daryl. Did she see him so clearly, right from the start, because she too had been an unwanted, inconvenient child? We don’t know what Carol's relationship to domestic violence was prior to Ed or how dysfunctional her home environment was.

CAROL’S FATHER “Trust” (1115)

Generally, a woman who enjoys a close relationship with her father, will not refer to him as her “old man.” Especially not if she’s from the Deep South. He’ll be ‘dad’ or ‘daddy’ to her if they had a loving relationship (like Maggie and Beth with Hershel) or more neutrally, when mentioned to a third party, ‘my father.’ “My old man” implies emotional distance, especially with how it’s paired here with a negative assessment. In what context would he have said this? It’s habitual (used to) and Carol’s delivery suggests she’s been the one on the receiving end of that piece of parental ‘wisdom.’ (Compare it to how her grandmother managed her when she was a child.)

It's likely that her father’s life experiences had made him pessimistic. Carol’s parents were young during an era of enormous social change and uncertainty. Depending on his age and exact circumstances, he could even have been subjected to the draft and have served in Vietnam.

In my opinion, it’s relatively safe to say that her parents didn’t have a positive influence on Carol. If a child is constantly told that she shouldn’t have any expectations for a happy outcome and if she has to remain hyper vigilant to protect herself, emotionally or physically, it teaches her that she’s unworthy of consideration or emotional support. Carol’s low self-esteem had its origin long before Ed showed up to make her life worse.

I have a few different scenarios in mind for Carol’s early family dynamics, which could provide some interesting storylines to explore for the character. But to answer your specific questions, I think Carol was an only child for a number of reasons (which I won’t get into here because of the length of this post) and while I don’t think her parents were divorced, it’s possible that they were never married in the first place. (That would also open up the potential for some very intriguing story choices, while shading what we already know about Carol's intimate relationships.) I’d say theirs wasn’t a happy marriage and like Lydia and Sophia (and Daryl!), Carol didn’t have a happy childhood.

[that-left-turn]

“Sounds like there needs to be more fan made content, so people have something to engage with and to drown out the inevitable noise from the four horsemen trying to promote S4. Fandom should be fun and the DD EPs shouldn’t get to hijack the agenda.”

This is very true and very evident, in my experience. Lately, there’s been stronger engagement with fan made Carol and Daryl content than there is with the official account’s attempts at engagement. Even beyond active fans, it feels like there’s a general audience ready and willing to reignite their enjoyment of the show that they remember enjoying way back when, but its fan made content that’s reaching them, not AMC.

Casual viewers have always responded favorably to Carol. That’s actually where you see the biggest dissonance between the creative decisions and audience expectations. It would be expected for a character that’s had a major arc like Carol’s—banishment through assault on Terminus—to emerge as one of the central characters of the narrative. Caryl’s joint emotional arc at the beginning of S5 leads to an expectation that there will be a payoff to that buildup by the end of the season. Instead, everything fizzles and we get increasingly erratic plotting with dropped storylines and story beats which don’t serve the characters. Shock value doesn’t build a lasting audience and there’s the decline in viewership in S6-8 because of the breach in trust between the writer and his audience.

A long running TV show needs to sort of ‘reinvent’ itself around season 5. It’s natural to see a fall in viewer numbers if there’s nothing new added, things mixed up to add excitement for what will happen next. In the case of TWD, Carol’s character development served that purpose, but then everything became muddled in an emotional arc that lacked any kind of emotional realism. You had to really reach to make any kind of sense out of “I can’t kill to protect those I love, so I will leave and pretend that they’re all alive.” It doesn’t fit with the character’s emotional takeaway from the Sophia arc or the grove arc.

The only reason Carol leaves Alexandria is because her inclusion would force the scene where the audience first meets Negan to play out entirely differently from what we got in the show. Even the reveal to Alexandria (in the Wolves arc) that Carol’s a formidable fighter feels hollow/shallow because there’s no one there to absorb the realization. Morgan already knew she was more than she pretended to be and the remaining Alexandrians never acknowledge it.

The general audience identifies with Carol because she rises to the occasion in the way viewers hope they themselves would, if they ended up living through a zombie apocalypse. She grapples with her morally gray decisions, with the demons from her past, with self-worth, with her bereavement in a very human way. It resonates to circumstances beyond her specific ones. The love she has for her extended found family and the sacrifices she makes to take care of them are qualities that are valued in our real life communities.

So, I’m always baffled by AMC’s poor decisions because this is the most basic concept of making a successful TV show. (That is, one that gets sustainable ratings across multiple seasons.) Josh Sapan, the then CEO of AMC, pitched the Caryl spinoff because he knew it would serve as the financial backbone to the franchise and the network. Its emotional core would draw a loyal fanbase and the premise of a road show would satisfy casual viewers with adventure, as well as the parts of the fandom that want an immersive world to be explored. The ‘lure of the West’ has always been an audience draw, from Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows in the 1880’s right through the mid-century Westerns of Henry Ford, to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and onward to HBO’s West World and the shows of Taylor Sheridan.

All a TWDU show really needs is a writer who’s faithful to the characters and can create an intriguing setting for them to explore. Someone who’ll breathe some life back into the tired lore and make that expansive enough to support the creation of more shows within the franchise. It’s really not difficult if you understand narrative structure and have halfway decent imagination. Carol and Daryl are both so rich to write for and Melissa and Norman’s otherworldly chemistry is a dream scenario for any production to have.

So much about Caryl is still unexplored and also, especially, Carol whose backstory largely remains a mystery after 15 years. (She was always more than the battered housewife we met in S1.) There’s still a vast canvas to fill for a showrunner, even if they didn’t create the characters and the parameters of the setting are long since set. Walkers don’t have to be boring or gimmicky. The audience will come back if the story is good.

[that-left-turn]

Thank you for sharing your AO3! I love the sound of Stick Figures. I’m really looking forward to reading it.

I think there’s still a want for caryl things. The fandom has gone very quiet, but it’s not through lack of want or love for the characters as far as I can tell. Absolutely everyone I know is disappointed with DD and nobody I know has any plans to watch season 4, and that has definitely cast a huge shadow over the fandom. But lots of people still love going back to earlier main show seasons as well as AU fan fiction.

I think it helps that AMC haven’t been promoting DD. It’s been allowing fans who previously retreated away to restore our memories of who the characters really are. It’s true that practically nobody wants to think about the spinoff, but honestly, parts of the fandom are waking back up because we finally have the space to enjoy what we actually love about them, rather than what DD has been trying to throw at us. I don’t know how long it will last, given that promotion for s4 is presumably around the corner. But there is still so much love for these characters - the real versions of them.

Sounds like there needs to be more fan made content, so people have something to engage with and to drown out the inevitable noise from the four horsemen trying to promote S4. Fandom should be fun and the DD EPs shouldn’t get to hijack the agenda.

I know I’ve said this before, but the moment your show is released, the characters cease to be ‘yours.’ You may have written for them, but they exist in an in-between space, belonging to the audience’s imagination just as much as the showrunner’s.

Melissa understands this concept perfectly. She talks about Carol in third person, unlike most TV actors who’ve played their characters for multiple seasons. Carol is hers, separate from her own identity, but Melissa also recognizes that Carol belongs to the viewers too. She has a responsibility towards those who love the character to attempt to maintain narrative integrity. As much as she’s able to when she’s neither financing, nor writing the show.

[that-left-turn]

Hi. I hope you’re doing well. I hope it’s okay to ask if you have any of your writing anywhere that you’d be comfortable sharing? Maybe I imagined this, but I could have sworn I saw your username as an author on 9Lives, but I don’t see it now. I love reading your thoughts and scene analyses. I’d love to read some of your work. Otherwise, I hope life is treating you kindly lately. <3

Once upon a good while ago, I had a 9Lives account, which I closed because the site has some peculiarities that forced me to edit the code of my uploads to increase readability and I didn’t have the time to spare for that. I do still have an AO3 account, but what’s there is unfinished and not of good quality:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/47837383

I’ve wanted to finish Stick Figures, but I have so little free time and every time I sit down, I’m confronted with how much I don’t like that it lacks an external plot. Granted, that’s the conceit of it: to add the missing emotional arc, but it makes me cringe because it’s such a no-no, and there’s also a weird time skip between chapters 2 and 3. It badly needs a chapter inserted. I have parts of it somewhere, along with a scene from chapter 9 😬 Like I said, I’ve been busy with work and in order to write this particular story, I have to rewatch the S11 episodes that any given chapter covers... multiple times and season 11 doesn’t improve on close study. So much wasted potential and, even with BTS shenanigans in mind, too many plotlines left to dangle without any payoff.

The moment for this fic seems to have passed too. Is there even an active fandom anymore after what DD did to the characters?

Anyway, if you still want to check it out, the link's above. I hope it’s entertaining, but it probably works best as an accompaniment to watching S11.

[that-left-turn]

Hi. I just want you to know that I really appreciate you. This fandom has been really lucky to have you.

Hi.

It’s been a while since I’ve been active on Tumblr—(when my asks dried up, I thought everyone had packed it up and left on account of how things were going for Carol in particular)—but I miss the characters. With the way AI is encroaching on how TV is written, it makes losing them even sadder.

There’s TWD fatigue in the GA because the franchise lost sight of being dystopian horror and AMC needs to repackage any new show they decide to make, but unfortunately, they don’t understand where they’re going wrong with the only one they haven’t yet canceled. Character is key.

Regardless. (Not getting sidetracked into a lengthy rant on what AI is doing to the industry.)

Thank you so much for your lovely ask, anon 💝 I wish I could’ve made some sort of real impact.

I love Carol and Daryl. There’s so much depth to their character arcs and so much of it is unexplored. We hardly know anything about Carol’s backstory, apart from the abuse she suffered and anything Carol’s said to anyone (who’s not Daryl) about herself is subject to evaluation because she’s such a deliciously unreliable narrator. We don’t know what’s true and, despite her having been on screen for 15 years, that makes her a goldmine to write for.

Anon, I hope you have a lovely holiday and to anyone who celebrates, merry Christmas🎄

[my-mt-heart]

What about the weekly Behind the Dead episodes and having Norman and Melissa do little clips while they’re on set? Is that all less than they normally do? I mainly mean about the actors having to be actively involved in it.

It’s very minimal effort and low cost 🤷🏻‍♀️

[that-left-turn]

I think you and anon are talking past each other. This kind of promotion is minimal effort and low cost for the studio, they don't want to put any money into a marketing campaign for a failing show that they've cancelled. AMC isn't doing well, so they can't afford to pour their dollars down the drain.

The production (not the studio) is trying to make whatever noise they can. Audience engagement/viewer produced content is low-cost, high-yield promotion and that's why there's more actor involvement than they usually have. Marketing is incredibly expensive and so is making a TV show—BTS snippets of actors are cheap (in comparison) and the most likely way to get self-sustaining involvement from fans.

The little clips are there for you to do the promotion and that's why there's so much of it.

[my-mt-heart]

Sorry to bring up the Find Me fight again, but I cannot for the life of me reconcile that with Daryl's arc. What you say about him being scared of losing her makes sense, especially with all that happened in the season before but HIM of all people should know what it's like to feel responsible for another person's death.He himself felt so guilty for Glenn's death and Maggie didn't blame him for a second. Plus he knows how much trauma Carol has around feeling responsible for other people dying.

I think the reason it doesn’t sit right is because we never got the payoff. The part where Daryl apologizes for being so harsh and opening up about what was really bothering him. It wasn’t about anyone’s “death.” It was about losing Carol.

[that-left-turn]

This sounds weird, but I love that scene. It’s so layered and Melissa is superb. It hits you right in the gut, so you don’t think too hard about the things that the writers don’t want you to notice (yet). The entire episode is nothing but connective tissue between a lot of episodes in S9 and 10, and a tease for what happened to Caryl’s relationship during the time jump after Rick’s supposed demise.

The cabin fight isn’t the only fight in the episode, but it’s supposed to overshadow the other very Caryl-like arguments by the uncharacteristically explosive nature of it. The Caryl flashbacks tell us there’s been friction for years, and Carol’s carelessness with her own life in the cave and at the ravine is the final stressor for Daryl. Like @my-mt-heart said, the fight isn’t about anyone’s death, that’s a red herring. Daryl isn’t angry that people died; he’s upset that Carol always leaves him and she’s had two recent close calls with what would be the final goodbye, despite him spending the entire season telling her—using his words, even—that he needs her there with him.

“I’m gonna need you to stay.” “We have a future.”

It’s such a shame that we never got any real conclusion to the arc in S11 because “Find Me” is intriguing and subtle in what it reveals about the characters.